The leaders of the opposition movement Group 24, Sukhrob Zafare and Nasimdžon Sharifov, are being tried behind closed doors. They disappeared from Istanbul, where they had been living in exile for ten years, and the General Prosecutor’s Office announced in August that they were in a prison in the Tajik capital. Banned as an “extremist association”, the organisation is not allowed to participate in any way in the political and social life of the country.
Dushanbe () – The trial of the leader of the opposition movement Group 24, Sukhrob Zafar, and his companion Nasimdžon Sharifov, is being held behind closed doors in the maximum security prison in Dushanbe. According to information from Radio Ozody, not even the relatives of the accused were allowed into the courtroom, and the authorities are not making any comments on the matter, so it is not even known whether there were lawyers present. The relatives themselves refused to answer calls, and had previously said that they had no information to share about the trial and the conditions of detention of the two opposition figures.
Another Group 24 activist, Mukhammadsobir Abdukakkhor, reports that relatives of the two detainees had attended the first court session on 18 September but were prevented from entering, asking “what transparency can we talk about, if the trial is being held in great secrecy, as in early Soviet times?” The group’s members issued a statement saying that the trial of Zafar and Sharifov represents “a gross violation of people’s rights, typical of widespread injustice in Tajikistan.”
The statement alleges that “this is not a fair trial, but rather an act of great political pressure with threats that confirm the authoritarian and corrupt nature of the Emomali Rakhmon regime, which uses all means to defend its power.” Both opponents had lived in Istanbul for several years, from where they disappeared at some point in an inexplicable manner, one in February and the other in March of this year.
Just six months later, on 9 August, the country’s Attorney General, Jusuf Rakhmon, announced at a press conference that the two leaders of the movement were in a prison in the capital and that an investigation was underway against them, without giving further details on the matter, nor on the charges against them, much less on their arrival in Tajikistan, which their colleagues described as a “kidnapping”.
Now, in court, the official charge is “inciting to change the constitutional order through the use of violence and internet communications,” which Group 24 considers “totally unfounded.” Zafar had been in Turkey since 2014, and during those ten years he regularly received threats with messages promising him death or kidnapping. Since 2018 he has been arrested several times by Turkish law enforcement, allegedly at the request of Tajikistan, but has always been released without consequences.
Šarifov had also been in Turkey since 2015 and was arrested three times, only to be released, and in 2018 he had been in prison for two months. Group 24 had been founded by businessman and opposition politician Umarali Kuvvatov, who was murdered in Istanbul in 2015, and the movement had been outlawed by the Supreme Court of Tajikistan in 2014 as an “extremist association”. Dozens of people had been arrested in the country, in Russia and abroad, left in prison for long periods of time simply for participating in the activities of the organisation, which was in fact not allowed to participate in the political and social life of Tajikistan at all.
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